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There is a time to be adventurous and take the path less travelled as Frost points out in the often quoted, “Road Not Taken” --but not with big data. I wonder what Frost would have to say about big data, a concept difficult to comprehend in the early 1900’s. In reviewing the poem (poetry being an arm chair interest of mine), it becomes clear that there is some ambiguity about whether Frost intended to promote taking the “Road Less Travelled.” In fact, it is thought that the poem was written in jest to his friend Lawrence Thomas to convey that the true regret is in not making a decision at all. This ambiguity and indecisiveness is very present in the big data ecosystem. Most organizations are cognizant of the disruptive force of big data -- it’s impact on the competitive business landscape and the way consumers live their daily lives. Fortunately, they also know there is little, if no room for regret at taking the Big Data Road Less Travelled or not choosing a path at all. To that end Pentaho has collected and shared four paths that many of...

This is my first blog post for Pentaho and there's no better occasion than celebrating our partners' success! Two of our EMEA partners have been shortlisted for IT Europas European IT & Software Excellence Awards and I will have the honour to accompany them to the awards dinner taking place this Wednesday at the Lancaster London Hotel. Our Norwegian Partner Conduct is shortlisted for the outstanding work implementing Pentaho for WiMP Music, a music streaming service similar to iTunes that is very popular in Northern and Central Europe. Its not the first recognition of their great work - they already won the 2013 BI Award for Innovation in Norway given by the Norwegian Computer Society last October . You can read more about the implementation here . Our OEM partner Kirchhoff Datensysteme Software GmbH (KDS) is shortlisted for its tool Poly.MIS, an industry specific Business Intelligence (BI) solution for plastic compounders built on the Pentaho business analytics platform. The specialised analytics tool helps plastic compounders to lower costs and maximize profits. You can read more about the implementation here . Pentaho has been growing impressively in Europe for the past...

Seems like these days, everyone falls into one of the three categories. You are either: Executing a big data strategy Implementing a big data strategy Taking a wait and see attitude If you’re in one of the first two categories, good for you! If you’re in the third, you might want re-think your strategy. Companies that get left behind will have a huge hill to climb just to catch up to the competition. If one of your concerns with moving forward with big data has been a lack of solid guidance to help pave the path to success, then you are in luck! Pentaho has recently released four Big Data Blueprints to help guide you through the process of executing a strategy. These are four use cases that Pentaho has seen customers execute successfully. So, this isn’t just marketing fluff. These are real architectures that supports real big data business value. The four blueprints now available on Pentaho’s website includes: Optimize the data warehouse Streamlined data refinery Customer 360-degree view Monetize my data These blueprints will help you understand the basic architectures that will support your efforts and achieve your...

I am now back home in San Francisco, but wanted to give an update on my last leg of the trip in London. I arrived on Wednesday night for a dinner with the team in London. We’ve always had a strong presence in the UK, but it was not until this past January that we opened a beautiful office in Euston Square . We also have added many new impressive hires in London such as Paul Scholey as Sales Director of EMEA and Laura Coles as Marketing Director of EMEA and APAC. It was great to spend some time Wednesday night getting to know the new team members and then to see the new office on Thursday. Dinner with Pentaho team in London Thursday was one of the busiest day of my European tour. My first meeting of the day was with one of the world’s largest interactive advertising agencies. They are using Pentaho to provide web analytics to their customers (including some of the world’s largest brands). This agency has impressive plans for rolling out their Pentaho-powered analytics platform to provide a distinctive service that can help their client’s...

I traveled to Lisbon yesterday in time to enjoy dinner with the 2 Pedro's - Alves and Martins and Nuno Moreira. We are lucky to have these three very talented men join the Pentaho team when we acquired Webdetails last year. My morning was taken up spending time with the Webdetails team in Pentaho’s new Portugal office. We acquired Webdetails in April of 2013 and I have never seen a company to integrate so seamlessly and start making impactful contributions as quickly as the Webdetails. This past year they continued to build upon their CTools series for creating and managing dashboards and reports and have used that talent to help deliver our 5.0 platform in September. A few other items to mention are the creation Sparkl and a project maturity classification system, building out the Pentaho Marketplace, new language pack installers , new community website and more. Ease of use and impressive design is their specialty. Even their job application website is a memorable experience. Next stop is London where I am look forward to seeing our new office and more non-stop days. First up is a team dinner where...

After a great day in Frankfurt, I was just winding down for the day and enjoying a fine German beer, when in California the team was just starting their day. And of course the calls started coming in from everyone who thought I would be starting my working day as well – the perils of the time differences when you are traveling! Day two of my European tour began in Paris. First on the agenda was a meeting with our customer PIXID , market leaders for internet-based workflow and document management services to services organizations using temporary staff. Today 300 enterprises, 700 SMBs and 6,500 agencies, representing 90 percent of the temp activity in France, are connected to PIXID services.The company has decided to integrate Pentaho Business Analytics with its collaborative “e-temp” platform to offer its clients and agency networks the ability to view advanced performance metrics as well as detailed interactive analysis. It was a great meeting and fantastic to see thought leaders like PIXID embedding our analytics capability as a means of further differentiating their own products and helping them to expand globally into new markets. We had...

My week in Europe is off to a great start. Yesterday, I was in Frankfurt, Germany with back-to-back meetings with partners and customers. It was nice to start the day off meeting with IT Novum , a Pentaho partner of four years. It has been good to hear about the big data market really gathering pace here in Germany, and that there is such widespread interest. One of the markets that is strongest for Pentaho in Germany is the embedded analytics market . While several Pentaho team members were busy yesterday not too far away in Hanover, Germany speaking about big data and embedded analytics at CeBIT , I had a chance to meet with our OEM partner Godesys and learn about how they embed Pentaho into their full ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution - which they have deployed to an impressive 600 customers. I was impressed by our partner Inovex who is also working on some fantastic big data customer deployments. It was great to hear a few excellent big data Hadoop case studies including one of the largest media companies in Germany using Pentaho and Hadoop to analyze...

This week I am excited to be in Europe visiting Germany, Portugal, France and London. My schedule is packed full of meetings with customers, partners and analysts, and I am of course looking forward to spending some time with the team in our newly established London office . It is a little over a year since my last trip to Europe, when I was impressed by the enthusiasm that I saw for big data. At the time I predicted that big data would start to enter mainstream production in 2013 and there is clear evidence of this with Pentaho’s fast growing EMEA business and rapidly expanding regional team. On this trip, a few of the companies that I will be speaking with include a major British telecoms company, one of the world’s largest interactive advertising agencies and a national bank. I am interested to hear how they - and others – are utilizing data and analytics to drive their businesses forward and benefit from innovative new revenue streams. It is always good to find out about how execution of big data analytics is working out for users in practice. I...

As part of our series highlighting women in tech for International Women’s Day on March 8th we are we are featuring Gretchen Moran , Software Developer at Pentaho. Gretchen's title may be 'Software Developer,' however, over her nine years at Pentaho, she has worn many technical hats to help lead the company to where it is today! Rosanne , Sarah , Michelle and Gretchen are just a few of the impressive women that work at Pentaho. Our goal with this series is to promote the theme of this year's International Women's Day... to inspire change . We encourage you to share their stories with girls and women to encourage them to become more interested in STEM or to hopefully bring more strong and smart women to the tech industry . Gretchen Moran, Software Developer at Pentaho What do you do at Pentaho? How long have you been at Pentaho? I have been developing software in the warehousing and business analytics space for 15 years, 9 of them with Pentaho. I have held many different roles through my many years at Pentaho. When I haven’t been coding, I have worked with...

As part of our series highlighting women in tech for International Women’s Day we are featuring Michelle Bradbury , Director of Product Management at Pentaho. Our goal with this series is to promote the theme of this year’s International Women’s Day…to inspire change. We encourage you to share this story and help our effort to bring more women into the field of technology. Michelle Bradbury, Director of Product Management at Pentaho What do I do at Pentaho? I am the Director of Product Management. I work with my team to create and deliver features that will make our product compelling in the market place. I have been at Pentaho for over two years and in the technology industry for over 18 years including companies like CapitalOne, Fujitsu, and Microsoft. What inspired you to work in technology? My interest in technology from the beginning was the power of data. Coming from a marketing background, I Initially had interest in utilizing data to try and understand customers motivations and buying behavior. That turned into a long career in data warehousing and business analytics. How do you think the industry could inspire more...